Dark of the Morning
by Lady-Dulcinea
Summary: AU. A 14 year old Baelfire shows up in post-curse Storybrooke having stowed away on Captain Hook's ship from Neverland. He finds a father who is learning to love, but a secret kept for 300 years may sever any bond they had hoped to recover. Can broken relationships be healed in a land WITH magic?


**Author's Note:**_** This story diverges from cannon at the beginning/middle of Season 2 as Bae is NOT Neal (or Henry's father) and has been in Neverland since he went through the portal. He is 14 at the beginning of this story. While it is an AU, I will try to keep it as canon as possible within the bounds of what I must change and spoilers from the latest episode are always a possibility.**_

"Bae?" Belle asked in disbelief as she opened her door to see the bedraggled boy on her doorstep. Water was dripping off of him in small rivulets, but he didn't even seem to notice. The hair limply plastered to his forehead was free of its usual soft curl. She ushered him inside with a careful grip on his elbow so he did not slip on the tile floor in the little foyer that led up to her apartment above the library.

Moments earlier, she had dragged herself from a blissfully deep sleep, awoken by the insistent buzzing of her call box. The annoying sound had manifested in her dream as a busy bee hovering by her ear. At first, Belle hadn't been sure she was fully awake and actually hearing the reverberating noise (the raging storm outside had drowned out even the ticking clock right beside her bed). Weakly she had pushed the button and gabbled a muted "Hello?" to whoever was seeking entrance to her apartment at this hour, but all she heard was a slight clicking that she now realized was Baelfire's teeth chattering from the biting Maine cold and freezing rain. The boy seemed to be in shock, shaking and taking shallow breaths. Noting the vacant look in his normally expressive umber eyes, Belle wasn't sure he even knew where he was. Her first priority was to get him upstairs and warm before she even tried to begin to find out what had happened.

After searching, quite literally, for centuries, Rumpelstiltskin's son had found _him_. Bae had been hidden in the hold of Killian Jones's ship and had been pulled through the portal to Storybrooke with the Capitan and their former mayor's mother. The teen had apparently had quite the journey from being sucked into the green vortex out of his father's arms, having spent hundreds of years in Neverland as a lost boy. One "awfully big adventure" later (to retrieve a treasure from Hook's ship), Bae had found himself headed for the "land without magic" he had originally tried to discover. It hadn't taken long for him to realize his father was here, how much time had passed, and that the man he had missed for so many hundreds of years, still was leaning on magic. Baelfire had initially been living on the streets of Storybrooke, unsure of this new world and where he stood with the father who had abandoned him. Emma Swan, however, could not allow the boy to wander orphaned and insisted that he be remanded into his father's care where he had been for the last three months. Belle knew that there were tensions and troubles (on top of everything Bae was still a 14 year old boy living with his single father), but she thought that Rumpelstiltskin and the son he had destroyed worlds to locate had been doing better over the last few weeks.

Making sure to lock the downstairs door behind her, Belle returned quickly to Bae's side and crooned soft words to him as she led him up to her apartment. The brunette shivered once herself, his clammy hand clutched in hers, as she crossed her small apartment to retrieve some dry clothes for the soaked boy. Rumpelstiltskin, she was fairly sure, had something of his in her dresser. She didn't realize that Bae had stopped in her front doorway until she pulled out the green tee-shirt and grey sweatpants from the drawer and turned to hand them to him.

"Bae?" She called, trying to prompt him to come into her bedroom for the clothes. She heard nothing but the sound of him breathing heavily still standing in her doorway. As she walked into the living room (dimly illuminated by the streetlights below), Belle felt her heart drop into her stomach. Baelfire was clutching his sides and sobbing silently, head bowed. She dropped the clothes onto the back of the sofa as she walked by and pulled him awkwardly into a hug. He was almost as tall as she, but not quite, and he folded into her gratefully. They sunk to the floor as Bae buried his wet head into the crook of her shoulder his sobs coming out with halting words.

"He killed her," the boy keened into her neck. "My mother. He killed her." Then his words began to slur with the force of his broken crying. Bae clung to her as if she were the last lifeline he had to a ship that was slowly leaving a drowning man in the middle of a ring of sharks.

Belle could not make out what he was saying other than repeating "he killed her" over and over, softer and softer, as if saying it just once more would make it untrue. She would not pretend that she didn't understand exactly who and what he was talking about, but first, she really needed to calm him down and get him into dry, warm clothing.

"Bae," she pleaded softly feeling the water in his hair sluice over her knuckles as she ran her fingers across the back of his hair. Belle shivered again at the sensation of the cold rainwater touching her skin. "I've got dry clothes for you Bae," she promised. "Please at least let me get you warmed up?"

She could feel his forehead rubbing against her neck as he nodded and relief replaced the heart pounding worry. Belle pulled back from him and cupped one of his cheeks in her hand. Her legs were falling asleep from her awkward kneeling position on the floor and she rotated one ankle, feeling the familiar tingle of blood rushing back into her toes. Wiping a stray tear away from Baelfire's reddened puffy cheek she gave him a sympathetic smile. "Why don't you go clean up a little in the bathroom? Take a hot shower and I'll put the clothes in the dryer to warm them up for you. Towels are under the sink."

Yielding silently, Bae got to his feet with jerky almost surreal movements and headed toward her bedroom and the little bathroom beyond. The teen had been in her apartment a handful of times in the few months he had been in Storybrooke and Belle felt that he was familiar enough with the layout that she didn't need to shadow him. Grabbing Rumpelstiltskin's tee-shirt and sweatpants from the back of the sofa, she headed toward the little alcove where her washer and dryer were hidden behind a folding door. She only realized she was herself shaking when she slammed the dryer door harder than necessary and it rattled on the tile. Belle couldn't tell if the trembling was from her fear for Bae's state of mind, or anger at what she could only imagine was a situation borne of Rumpelstiltskin's anger.

Exhaling a shaky breath, Belle stepped into her small kitchen and retrieved her cell phone where it was plugged up for the night on the beige counter. Listening intently, and satisfied that Bae had turned on the water for his shower, she flipped quickly through her contacts and pressed the one saved as "Mr. Gold". She had found it amusing to use his cursed name when she first awoke to her memories, but Belle was less than amused now. Every ring that went unanswered made her purse her lips in frustration.

"Belle?" The slightly annoyed voice on the other line barked in her ear when he finally picked up.

"I know you're worried sick," she started, "and I'm not even going to ask what happened. But he's safe. He's with me." Belle heard him let out a soft moan of relief that she knew was genuine, no matter what had happened between the two earlier in the evening.

"Belle-" Rumpelstiltskin started, but she didn't let him finish.

"He can stay tonight," She said. "Might be better actually, but don't come rushing over here and make things worse," Belle warned. "You're still not welcome. This doesn't change anything between us, Rumple."


End file.
